"Coloring helps Kathy with her dementia, calming her anxiety and helping stimulate cognition. Their grandson, Colby McCaskill, was visiting from New York, where he's finishing up his senior year at Fordham University. He grabbed a gold colored pencil and joined them. 'How long have you been working on this coloring book?' he asked his grandmother."
"This is not what past visits used to look like, when his grandparents would color with him. Now, his grandparents are aging and changing. Caregiving roles are shifting. When Colby was growing up, his Papa worked as a healthcare executive and his Grammy was a teacher. They were always adventuring and telling stories about 100-mile bike rides and skiing double black diamonds."
"To deal with all those feelings, Colby made what he calls an audio letter to his grandfather. Dear Papa, the epistolary begins, 'It's hard to admit because it feels like there's no solution, but I really wish you and Grammy weren't growing so old.' The resulting podcast is the grand prize winner of this year's NPR College Podcast Challenge."
Dick and Kathy McCaskill, both in their mid-70s, spend time coloring together in their Florida rental condo, a therapeutic activity that helps Kathy manage her dementia and anxiety. Their grandson Colby, a Fordham University senior, visits from New York and joins them. The family dynamic has shifted dramatically from Colby's childhood when his grandparents were active adventurers—his grandfather was a healthcare executive and his grandmother a teacher. Now they navigate cancer and dementia, living day to day. Struggling with these changes, Colby created an audio letter podcast to his grandfather expressing his difficulty accepting their aging. This intimate, vulnerable podcast won the grand prize in NPR's College Podcast Challenge, standing out among hundreds of entries for its honest exploration of family communication around difficult topics.
#aging-and-caregiving #family-relationships #dementia #podcast-storytelling #intergenerational-communication
Read at www.npr.org
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]